


Blinded

by Deejaymil



Series: 2018 Advent Adventures with Blythe and Deejay [1]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Advent Calendar, Emily in Glasses, F/M, Glasses kink, Mild Sexual Content, One Shot, Or lust?, Requited Love, Something is requited anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 00:41:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16800265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: She must have been blind to miss this.





	Blinded

**Author's Note:**

> [Evidence that this is entirely Ferret's fault and you can all blame her for Reid's new glasses kink.](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/414091365345918977/517500285996761113/Screenshot_2018-11-29-09-18-42.png)
> 
> Day One of mine and Blythechild's 2019 Advent Challenge (all her idea). FIlls will be mostly every other day because of life commitments, but we have some fun stuff coming, I promise ;)

The world is clearer in them, the lines sharper and the colours brighter. Emily’s not sure that’s such a good thing, really. Not in her line of work; not in her life. Anything that clarifies the shittiness of humanity, the feckless waste of human life they wade through every single day they go to work, that can’t be a positive in her book.

They’re nothing but some glass in a gaudy frame, but they represent everything she’s been running from. It feels dangerous, slipping them on, walking to the smeary mirror mounted in between the neat rows of frames that are far more fashionable than the ones she’s picked. The words that follow are dangerous too, the chirpy assistant tossing a calm _how do you feel about those then?_ at her like she doesn’t realise that these glasses are the beginning of the end of Emily Prentiss. They highlight all her inadequacies: the lines around her eyes and mouth, the tired touch to her skin, the wrinkle on her brow. She’s an old woman weary of facing the world she’s in, finally seeing clearly thanks to half a paycheque and a wanton desire to learn all the ways her body is failing her.

“I’ll need contacts too,” is all Emily says in answer to that dangerous question.

Can’t wear glasses in the field, after all. One wrong blow and she’ll be blinded.

Out of all of them, Reid is the only one who doesn’t tease her when she walks into the conference room with her glasses on and back up. They mean well, all of them—even Morgan—but Emily feels like a cat about to spit and snarl when they draw attention to this weight perched on the bridge of her nose. The frames are slim, not fashionable at all, but they’re as heavy as all the time she’s lived and growing heavier with every tick tick tick of the proverbial clock. But Reid doesn’t say anything, just watches her with his expression blank; she remembers that he needs help to see clearly too.

This strangeness continues. Even when the novelty of her specs has worn off for the others, life slowly returning to its now high def normality—Emily can’t remember when she stopped seeing the leaves on the trees or the weave of the carpet below, but having all these details back is some small blessing she hadn’t realised she’d wanted—Reid continues acting strangely. Stranger than usual. He’s never normal, not really, and she’s always loved that about him except for now when his normal meter has ticked so far from centre that she’s sure she sees him walk into a wall one day because he’s too busy looking at her.

He doesn’t admit it, of course, but there’s a touch of pink around his cheeks and ears as he saunters past with his mouth set in a firm line, reminding her so much of Sergio when he’s affronted that she can’t help but laugh. It’s the first time she’s laughed since that dangerous visit to the optometrist; a real, startled bark that earns a look from him and then, as she’s watching, increases the pink on his cheeks to more than a touch.

She feels exposed. Like his stare is seeing more than the decorum behind her laugh. Like instead he’s seeing _her_ , like the glasses that obscure her face now have somehow made her more vulnerable than she is without them.

Shaken, she stops laughing.

She’s never done well with feeling exposed.

They’re at a conference in Atlanta when it happens. It’s an overnight stay since the meeting ran late and neither wants to drive tired. They end up in her room with her filling out the daily crossword while he helps as the night ticks by. Despite the drive home looming, they don’t bid each other goodnight. The night seems to call to them both in a way it doesn’t other people; Emily knows Spencer’s an insomniac and she’s always flirted with the idea of it. It’s just her and him and the ticking clock and the scratch of her pen on the newspaper below, two glasses of cheap soda set on the table and dripping condensation to spread in a wet circle on the cloth they rest on.

She taps her pen, reaching up to rub her eyes and knocking her knuckle against cool glass instead. It startles her still and she hisses a breath, feeling the quiet still of the moment break.

When she looks up, he’s watching her and his expression is unfathomable.

“Alright, out with it,” she says. “Tease me about them. Come on, I can tell you want to—you haven’t stopped side-eyeing me since I got the damn things. I know they’re ugly—”

“They’re nothing of the sort,” he replies. His voice is a quiet hum in this silent room; it makes her wonder how often he’s used that tone before, the soft rasp of what a part of her would call his bedroom voice if that concept didn’t feel obscene to label him with. “I find them…”

He stops. There’s an unbroken quiet between them.

He breaks it without breaking it, reaching up with his fingers and turning the moment loud and vivid, clarifying for sure the danger she’s in. The danger in the touch of his fingers—they’re warm and dry, the nails cut neat, the pads soft—to her cheek as he presses his thumb to her cheekbone and draws it across her skin like he’s painting a picture and she’s a blank canvas waiting for him to bring her to life. She watches him through those lenses, seeing everything and understanding nothing. The line of his mouth, the shadow of stubble on his jaw, the pocks and scars of a living, breathing, damaged human sitting so close to her. There’s a dimple at the corner of his mouth that moves when he smiles, deepens, and there’s a divot between his eyes when he furrows his brows that she can’t breathe to imagine bringing her mouth to. She sees details to him she’s never noticed before, drawn in sharp-ink relief to her corrected eyes.

Finally, he speaks, his hand still touching her cheek and at the cusp of pulling away. “They make me wish I had the courage to ask you to kiss me,” he says with all that broken quiet layered deep into his voice, everything dangerous, every bit of that human potential she’d been afraid of seeing.

Kissing is just as dangerous as seeing; it leaves her just as exposed. She never kisses the men she fucks, only the ones she loves.

She’s fucked more men then she’s kissed, that’s a given, and she’s not sure she’s never kissed a man first. What does that say about her?

Probably more than what comes next does.

“What if I ask you?” she says.

He smiles, and she sees every shape of it.

He still kisses her even when they’re naked and crushed against each other. Kissing is the fulcrum for him, the one thing giving him the power to push back against her overwhelming force. He kisses like she’s special, like she’s worth something, like kissing itself is something fragile and beautiful and spectacular. Slow at first, and soft, a whisper of his lips against her, until she lets him in and begs him to come deeper, harder, to help her fight this indomitable pressure building from within her that she’s worried will spill out if they don’t hold it back.

The glasses are still on, those gaudy frames with their thick glass weighing them down. Mostly because the moment she’d undressed in front of him and stood there in nothing but them, he’d gotten hard and stayed that way. Captivated is the word to describe the way he looks at her. Enthralled works too. He kisses her and watches her in her unfashionable frames and then he breathes her name in the way that she now knows is the voice he uses in bed when he’s untangling around some pretty thing against him, even when that pretty thing is her and she’s older and more worn than he deserves.

“You have a kink,” she teases him as he pants and leans forward to bump his nose against hers, leaving a sticky line across her leg as he shifts under her and she props herself over ready to sink down. Exposed, almost, but there’s something in his hands on her and the way he kisses that quietens those fears; how can she be vulnerable when he refuses to see her as anything of the sort?

“It’s not a kink,” he replies, eyes flickering. Open, shut, half-open now, heavy-lidded, and he looks at her like he’s already inside her. “You’re beautiful. They accentuate what’s already there.”

This isn’t the fresh confession of a newly sinned man. And that feels deliciously shocking, sinking down and feeling him push inside her as she luxuriates in all this new knowledge. He’s moving in her in the way that suggests that it’s not the first time for him—not even close. He’s moving in the way that suggests he’s already mentally lived this moment so many times in his head that this moment for him is purely emotional, far beyond the physical, and he cements that with his mouth on hers as he curls close and chokes out her name.

The clock is silent. All she can hear is the shared thumps of their hearts.

Even with her eyes shut, it’s clear to her now; the feel of the tangled sheets below her, his pulse quickening, her hands bunched hard like she’s trying to hold them steady, the way he begs her name and the way it twists into a gloriously shaped moan that she’s only too shocked to realise she’s returning.

She must have been blind to miss this, but she’s never been gladder to see.


End file.
